Today it is Samhaim, I spotted an off-the-cuff remark on Twitter about women being executed for ‘witchcraft’ in the past, and I also knew that many men were executed for ‘witchcraft’ in the past, so I decided to see if I could get some half-reasonably accurate data on the genders of executed witches.
I got rather rough lists of names from both Wikipedia and here. Processing the two lists was not fun :-
- First I removed duplicates where possible.
- I flagged as M(ale) all the names that were obviously (to me) male. Or where there were other clues (“husband”).
- I flagged as F(email) all names that were obviously women, those where there was some doubt, and those where there was a hint (“daughter”).
- I flagged as F(emale) all surname-only names.
This quite possibly over-estimates the number of women executed for witchcraft, and is nowhere near accurate (a list of 477 names out of tens of thousands is a hopelessly small sample).
Out of that list of names, 384 were women (approximately 75%) and 113 were men (approximately 25%). This is nowhere near equal, but neither were male executions so rare that you can honestly say “women were executed for witchcraft”; it has to be “women and men were executed for witchcraft” (or some variation of that).
Having said that, it would be nice to see some proper historical statistical work done to see if a more accurate ratio could be determined.
